The U.S. Navy's Remarkable Transformation

Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., USN (Ret.), a distinguished and highly decorated naval officer and submariner, also is a noted naval historian and novelist. Beginning with Run Silent, Run Deep, his classic novel depicting submarine warfare during World War II, continuing with his solidly researched history The United States Navy: 200 Years, and culminating in last year's publication of Salt and Steel: Reflections of a Submariner, Beach has written 13 books--continuing the writing tradition established by his father, who also was a Naval Academy graduate and career naval officer.

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Two and a quarter centuries ago, on the North American continent a new nation was created, born of an idealistic and truly unprecedented concept of self-government. Formed in revolution, it created a navy that it disbanded when the revolution was over. The nation's founding fathers apparently thought a distant, idealistic nation, with no territorial ambition against any other, would excite no enmity--nor need to defend itself against anything except armies, or aborigines, on the land. It would need no navy. After only a decade, however, this premise was found not to be true, and the U.S. Navy was recreated.

As might be expected, the new Navy then authorized has had its ups and downs. Its total demise between 1785 and 1794 was the worst example, and the nadir of U.S. sea power. Now, on the threshold of the 21st century, the United States Navy has flowered into the most powerful sea-force the world has known.

Building on the pioneering achievements attained during the 20th century by its air, surface, submarine, and amphibious forces, today's Navy has launched a revolution at sea. Marked by new generations of highly accurate, all-weather, and long-range land-attack weapons and supported by innovative developments in combat systems, information technology, and warfighting doctrine, this revolution will have lasting impacts on U.S. national security for decades to come.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jay L. Johnson recently proclaimed that the U.S. Navy's continued forward presence and the ongoing development of global-economic interdependence would make the next 100 years a "naval century." But throughout the progression of events at sea of the past 100 years, including today's revolutionary technical innovations, the Navy's development is a continuous story of dedicated people--men and women, officers and Sailors, uniformed and civilian--who were and are committed to a vision of U.S. naval power at sea.

The Prelude

The United States was fortunate in having the navy of Britain against which to whet its newly reconstituted naval blade early in its history: the War of 1812. This, no doubt, accounts for many historians' continued fascination with that short conflict. U.S. Navy ships were excellent and, in the main, well-handled. Victories imparted a great upsurge of confidence, and in the war's aftermath the United States began to build ever more magnificent warships--so well-designed and constructed that they received admiring plaudits the world over. But following the War of 1812 there was little hard employment for them. The U.S. Navy had no Napoleonic anvil on which to shape and forge itself for several decades. The most important result of those formative years was international acceptance of U.S. naval and maritime competence.

U.S. bluejackets looked with pride on their series of victories over their mother navy, that of Great Britain, and made much of the naval traditions then born. But for half a century U.S. naval personnel found no employment worthy of all their efforts. Then came the Civil War--not, however, an "ideal" war upon the high seas. With only a few exceptions, the Civil War was a coastal war of blockade and commercial strangulation.

Nonetheless, the "War Between the States," as it was sometimes called back then, gave much to the Navy in terms of leadership and innovative ship design. But after it was over the nation was hurting badly. In recovery it turned its eyes westward, across the inviting land, and again allowed its Navy to sink into decay.

Surprisingly, next to nothing was done with the ironclads and monitors developed by both sides during the Civil War. The explanation was probably the combination of returning isolationism, the cost of modernizing, and the fact that the nation was mortally tired. The wind was free, if sometimes unpredictable; sailing a ship was a true art, proudly held, that cost very little money; steam engines and coal were totally inartistic, and very expensive besides. Economy had become the national watchword, so far as the Navy was concerned.

The Navy continued to "show the flag," but in embarrassment, in old wooden ships that were usually good to look at but otherwise useless. Foreign men-of-war left them always behind with their iron hulls and coal-burning steam engines. In the meantime, Europe, Japan, and even China had begun to apply the discoveries of the industrial revolution to their own imperial navies. Again, America's leaders of the day felt no obvious need for a navy. Improvement comparable to that experienced after the War of 1812 would have to wait until the end of the century, when, after another victorious war, an activist president would be able to set things right.

This period after the Civil War, from 1865 to 1885, is therefore remembered as "the time of the doldrums," not much better than the total demise experienced 80 years earlier. Worse, it earned our Navy the professional ridicule of thoughtful men of the sea. The U.S. Navy had its own thoughtful men too, however, and their demand for modernization led to the creation of the U.S. Naval Institute in 1873, the founding of the Naval War College in 1884, and finally to a national demand that the Navy be set to rights. Two decades after the Civil War, the Navy at last began to build steel warships with steam engines and modern guns in turrets. The battleship USS Maine, whose destruction was one of the proximate causes of the Spanish-American War, was one of the first of these.

From the point of view of dedicated naval officers and others, all this happened just in time. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer are today looked upon as purveyors of "yellow journalism," accused of instigating the 1898 war with Spain to sell newspapers. Another interpretation of that era would, more fairly perhaps, put them at the forefront of national unrest resulting from an enlarged view of the world.

To a large degree, this "ideal little war with Spain" mirrored the War of 1812 in one important way. From it, as in 1815, grew the warship-building campaign that the United States should have started in 1865. At the turn of the 20th century the U.S. Navy needed good warships and good leadership. Theodore Roosevelt provided both. Before the end of his second term as president, he was able to send a fleet of first-class, modern battleships--the "Great White Fleet"--on a breath-taking cruise around the world to show the flag in a way entirely different from the way it had been shown just a few years earlier. It had a different message as well. Ebullient Theodore Roosevelt did not put it into quite these words, but it was clear enough. The United States was beginning to command at sea.

Idealism and Reformers

The Navy's formative years had lasted 125 years. Now, at the birth of the 20th century, it was an established institution. The question of whether the nation should have a strong Navy had been resoundingly answered in the affirmative one more time--this time for the foreseeable future.

The United States now stretched across the North American continent and had acquired, in the bargain, a sizable overseas empire in the Caribbean and in the far Western Pacific. The protection of these territories was a national responsibility. With the advent of more powerful and faster steamships, and the expansion of global telecommunications, the world had become a smaller place. Thought and policy were now independent of physical movement. The United States reached from coast to coast, and it had to look in both directions.

As part of this new international focus, the United States also began building the Panama Canal (a tremendous job, that). The mammoth undertaking was completed only a few years later, making possible easy redeployment of the Navy's ships, and all the great ships that came after them, between the East and West Coasts of the continent (until, with the advent of the modern aircraft carrier, some of them had become too big).

Only a few years after completion of that extraordinary undertaking, the second generation of Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, no longer white-and-buff, but painted a haze-grey "war color," was a third again faster than the first, its ships twice as big, some able to fire shells weighing half a ton or more to ranges beyond the horizon from three times as many huge-barreled, turreted rifles. In the meantime, Germany and England, both well ahead of the United States as naval powers, had begun a battleship-building race. Both nations had amassed fleets of these new Dreadnoughts by the time war came again to Europe in 1914.

The deep underlying idealism of that generation of naval officers also made its mark on the U.S. Navy. As technological development drove the horizons of thought to fill vacuums undreamed of in the days of sail, they strove to harness their minds to improve the Navy. There was much to work on.

Foremost among those bent on reforming and improving the Navy was Rear Adm. William Sowden Sims. Probably no American naval leader before or since, with the possible exception of Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz years later, or Adm. Arleigh Burke later still, has had the charismatic personality of Sims. He was the leader of an extraordinary group of reformers who worked tirelessly within the system to better it. Widely acclaimed as the person responsible for teaching the Navy how to shoot straight, he also made lasting contributions to the proper design of the most important ships of the time--the battleships--and in the proper and efficient organization of the Navy and the Navy Department. The naval bureaucracy's resistance to the correction of the many existing deficiencies in ship design--and its near-automatic reflex to reject all new ideas or technological developments--came in for hot and frequent criticism from him.

World War I was the biggest war ever fought in that small, convoluted peninsula of the Euro-Asian continent. It caused fantastic loss of life and irrevocably changed the shape and face of that part of the world. The conflict started from economic rivalry and militarism among the principal nations, but self-destruction, unprecedented civilian suffering, the fall of monarchies and spread of revolution, and a predictable second coming were its principal legacies. It fully deserved both of the names by which it is known to history: The Great War, The World War, and, because it was fought a second time, World War I.

Unfortunately for navy buffs and historians, the conflict saw only a few naval battles. Only one, Jutland in 1916, could be compared to Horatio Nelson's Trafalgar (1805) in terms of forces engaged, but it was not comparable in outcome. At Trafalgar, British forces totally wiped out the French-Spanish fleet, sinking or capturing 19 ships and driving away the rest in confused flight. At Jutland, there was no decisive victory. The British suffered by far the greater loss of ships and personnel, but the Germans seized the chance, under dark of night, to disengage. So Jutland became known to history as indecisive. No further battle at sea followed, the stress of war was too great, and Germany was forced to give up when the impact of added U.S. military muscle began to make its mark.

A division of five U.S. battleships formed the initial American Battle Squadron as part of the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, Scotland, but the major employment of U.S. naval forces during the war was in convoying supplies of all sorts across the Atlantic. When Sims arrived in London in 1917 to direct the Navy's operations in European waters, England's Adm. John Jellicoe, Great Britain's First Sea Lord, related his country's desperate situation at the hands of Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare. A cable to Washington, D.C., brought prompt action with the dispatch of a first destroyer division under the command of Cdr. Joseph K. Taussig.

In the eyes of the world at large the major naval development of that war was an entirely different type of combat--under the sea--followed closely by the unheralded marriage of the airplane and the warship.

The Road to Pearl Harbor

Had there been a counterpart to Sims during the interwar period culminating in the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the debacle in naval warfare that took place at the outset of World War II might have been prevented. After World War I, the world embarked with some enthusiasm on its first attempts to limit arms. Since battleships were the biggest and most obvious military objects, as well as the most expensive, they logically became the first targets for reduction. But professional military persons are not the only ones with better vision backward than forward. At the time they fell under limitations, battleships of World War I design were already obsolescent, and navies were undergoing great and hidden changes--and reductions. By the early 1930s, the U.S. fleet had been reduced to a force of just over 300 active Navy ships.

Submarines and aircraft were beginning their slow--and contentious--rise to acceptance as first-line naval-weapons carriers. The cult of the battleship as the backbone of the "real Navy" persisted, however. Absent a Sims or an influential reform constituency, the natural tendency was for a return to the old ways. The U.S. Navy after World War I--strong and feeling good about itself--was feeding on itself.

The inability to recognize the need for change when it is there, or the refusal to allow change from the old ways, can only give the advantage to someone else. The Navy's wonderful fleet of great World War I battleships--all commissioned during or immediately after that war--was to discover this lesson afresh on 7 December 1941.

The idea of a ship devoted solely to handling wheeled aircraft on a long flat deck received little encouragement during the 1920s and 1930s. How could an aircraft carrier--unarmored, big, and vulnerable--remain afloat after being hit by a salvo of 16-inch shells? A carrier might be useful for scouting, but it had no business in the battle line. Only aviators asked the newly pertinent question: What use was a battle line with weapons of 20-mile range if aircraft carriers could send weapons with greater accuracy ten times as far?

Similar questions were being asked by those acquainted with the tremendous threat posed by submarine warfare. The submarine force also would have been well served had it had someone like Sims to look into the design and performance of its torpedoes. Their design problems paralleled the deficiencies he had corrected in the guns and ammunition-handling systems on surface warships. When World War II began, U.S. submariners found their torpedoes running so deep that even a zero-depth setting was often not shallow enough to hit an enemy ship. Torpedoes sometimes detonated harmlessly before reaching the target. Design flaws in the weapons' detonators meant that the torpedo might be a dud if it hit a ship's hull squarely--i.e., a perfect shot. Throughout the war, torpedoes occasionally ran in a circle--sometimes with fatal results to the submarine that had fired them. Nearly two years of the war would elapse before the first three of these design problems were identified and corrected. The fourth never was. An entrenched Navy torpedo-design bureaucracy in the Bureau of Ordnance--coupled with tight peacetime purse strings on live-fire testing--critically hampered the submarine force's effectiveness during the early years of the war and resulted in the needless combat loss of many submariners.

Fortunately for the Navy, and the nation, far-sighted innovators and congressional advocates for a strong U.S. fleet (Rep. Carl Vinson, especially) persisted in their efforts during the late 1930s to build a modern Navy sized properly to meet the strategic requirements levied upon it by national leadership and world events. Nearly every class of major WWII-era combatant warships--with the exception of the mass-produced "jeep" escort carrier--was designed before war began. Modern aircraft also were on the drawing boards to replace the fleet's slow and outdated designs. U.S. Marines perfected the principles of amphibious warfare by trial and error during the 1930s--setting the stage for the success of their island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific.

Intellectual ferment and war games at the Naval War College paid their dividends too. Following World War II, Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz--a 1923 graduate--observed that, with the exception of Japan's "kamikaze" suicide planes, "... the war with Japan had been reenacted in the game rooms at the Naval War College by so many people, and in so many ways, that nothing happened during the war that was a surprise."

The Global Armada

If it can be said that the U.S. Navy had only about 56 hours of combat experience prior to World War II, it also can be said that World War II was one long gigantic battle with almost unrelieved stress on all participants. Respites in harbor were conspicuously few. In the Atlantic, it was a long, torturous, weather-traumatized war against German submarines. There was little action against surface raiders, particularly warships, since the Royal Navy had eliminated or neutralized most of these before U.S. entry into the war. It is an axiom of naval warfare that the entire purpose of navies and sea power is to influence events on land. The success of Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion of Hitler's "Fortress Europe," was enabled by the success of its naval assault phase--Operation Neptune--in achieving strategic surprise, maintaining control of the English Channel, and successfully landing and resupplying allied forces in the face of bitter opposition from entrenched Nazi forces.

From the point of view of the participants, prosecution of the naval war can be divided into four basic fields of combat arms: air, surface, submarine, and amphibious. The importance of mobile sea-based logistics and service-force ships also was vividly demonstrated in the Navy's ability to operate continuously at sea in a forward-deployed posture, far from major shore support or repair facilities.

Technical research and development played key roles in the victory at sea--reflected most dramatically in the wartime application of radar on U.S. surface ships, submarines, and aircraft. The unsung heroes of cryptology and intelligence made decisive contributions throughout the war. The Navy also was blessed by an unusually strong team of highly capable visionary strategists and combat leaders--best exemplified by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest J. King at the seat of government and Chester Nimitz, Pacific Fleet commander, in the field. By August 1945, U.S. aircraft factories and shipyards--working around the clock in a prodigious industrial effort--produced a fleet of more than 103,000 Navy and Marine aircraft, and 6,700 surface warships, submarines, patrol craft, amphibious vessels, and auxiliary ships. The U.S. Navy's global armada was unparalleled in size before or since.

Commanders in Nimitz's principal task forces shared his assertive outlook on the conduct of the war with Japan, and they never ceased to press their advantage when the tide of battle turned. Submariners, accustomed to the idea that only a ship able to submerge in the face of superior forces could survive in the far Western Pacific, particularly marveled at the surface fleet's entrance into areas they had heretofore thought accessible only to them. They marveled also at the huge fleet of aircraft carriers--so large that even from the air only a part of it could be seen at any one time--their country had created.

Marine Corps amphibious doctrine matured as the costly lessons of early assaults from the sea in the Pacific were painfully assimilated. Marines emphasized the need to strike hard and prosecute the land campaign quickly--believing an all-out attack in the beginning would result in fewer casualties in the long run. In their island-hopping campaign--or in Gen. Douglas MacArthur's imaginative leap-frogging amphibious attacks on Japanese forces in New Guinea, for that matter--there was nowhere either side could retreat to. The battle, once joined, was to the death.

Pearl Harbor clearly illustrated, among many other things, the fallacy of permitting respect for old tradition, extremely valuable in the right context, to rank above research, logic, and capability. The battleships sunk there could have rendered a good account of themselves against other battleships 15 miles away. Against aircraft from carriers 250 miles away they were powerless, and the embarrassment showed.

Among naval historians, it is customary to describe the attack on Pearl Harbor as a "blessing in disguise," except for the loss of life, for in an instant of time it demolished a pattern of thinking that might have been disastrous had it continued long into the war period. Suppose Japan had declared war in the accepted manner?

From all one can today surmise, there might soon have occurred a fleet action somewhere in the vicinity of Wake Island, as projected in Adm. Husband Kimmel's war plans. But the Japanese fleet had ten first-line carriers in the Pacific--the U.S. Navy only three, possibly augmented by two more hastily returned from the Atlantic theater. In a war at sea, five U.S. carriers would have stood no chance against Japan's ten. The fleet engagement would have been a disaster far greater than the one that actually occurred at Pearl Harbor. For this interpretation, we have Nimitz's fairly well-informed opinion to thank. World history, at all events, might have been very different.

What actually happened, of course, was that the demise of U.S. battleships turned the Pacific War over to the forces best-equipped to deal with it: aircraft carriers, miraculously sent away from Pearl Harbor just in time, and submarines, outfitted with faulty torpedoes though they were. This history is well known, although there has never been an adequate explanation for the orders, just before the Pearl Harbor debacle, that sent the carriers out of harm's way (nor for the failure to proof-test the torpedoes better). Nimitz's leadership was inspired; U.S. code-breaking also was inspired. The Battle of Midway, occurring only six months after Pearl Harbor, was the turning point of the war, although it had three years yet to run. American blood lust was up, another result of Pearl Harbor, and Japan had nowhere to go but down.

Essex-class carrier task forces made progressively greater inroads against Japanese forces after Midway, as did the Marine Corps--and so did increasingly effective submarines. The great fleet battle everyone was expecting finally took place, late in 1944 at Leyte Gulf, along with the associated battles of the Philippine Sea, Surigao Strait, and San Bernadino Strait. Rejuvenated, modern, and well-fought Navy surface combatants played their invaluable supporting roles with telling effect, but the war at sea, fought in desperation by Japan, was now like no naval battle ever joined. When it was over, the Japanese navy had ceased to exist, and it was recognized that naval warfare would hereafter be different from everything that had gone before.

In any description of World War II, there must at least be mention of the tremendous effect that was achieved--and at what low cost--by the submarine forces of the warring nations. This was outstandingly the case with Germany and the United States. For strategic and operational reasons it was less true of the British, Italian, and Japanese submarine forces. Taking the U.S. Submarine Force Pacific Fleet as an example, during World War II it sank one third of Japan's navy and nearly two thirds of her merchant marine. Had U.S. torpedoes performed as intended, Japan's losses would have been much greater still, particularly early in the war, and it might have ended much sooner. Yet, the total U.S. Submarine Force, including all support personnel, amounted to only two percent of the U.S. Navy--a perfect example of the tremendous disparity of result when unprecedented techniques are introduced into old-fashioned situations.

The Nuclear Revolution

In the decades that followed World War II, there was no time for the Navy's peaceful consolidation of its remarkable accomplishment. The nation faced an uneasy peace, and U.S. sea services responded to a continuing stream of international crises and contingencies. Long years of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union were spiked with politically limited--and socially divisive--wars in Korea and Vietnam. In World War II's aftermath, as the Navy's size was radically reduced (to 634 active ships by June 1950), its ships and Sailors had to be driven harder than ever before. Crews spent more time at sea and had less time for the upkeep of their ships or, in a manner of speaking, for themselves. The pressures of exercises increased and, because of rapidly changing technology, so did the demands for proficiency. The trend continues to the present day.

World War II ended with deployment of the nuclear weapon, and it is now clear that this will be its all-time legacy. At the end of the war many submariners began to wonder whether future years would bring worries about atomic depth charges. No one, so far as is known, at that time thought about the implications that nuclear power might have for submarines instead of against them. No one, that is, except a certain small "Engineering Duty Only" captain who had been assigned to the electrical engineering section of the Navy Bureau of Ships until, by some happenstance perhaps not entirely accidental (he sought it assiduously), he was directed to look into nuclear power for propulsion of ships.

To detail that extraordinary man's accomplishment is not the purpose of this essay, except to point out that, except for the technical spikes represented by early U.S. inventors, the last half of the history of U.S. Navy submarines--and today's nuclear-powered aircraft carrier--has been totally dominated by the nuclear power plant developed by Adm. Hyman George Rickover and his devoted helpers.

Difficult though he admittedly was, when it came to nuclear power Rickover emphatically had what the U.S. Navy needed. First, he had the foresight to see, far ahead of all his contemporaries, what a nuclear power plant could do for the submarine and, later, its most potent surface warship. The best WWII-era submarines, with postwar improvements, were capable of 20 knots on the surface, in which condition they could range about 10,000 miles on a full load of diesel fuel, and 15 knots submerged on the storage battery for an hour--after which the "can" would be "flat" (the battery completely discharged).

At very slow speed, a submerged submarine hunted by enemy antisubmarine units could stay down for perhaps 48 hours, but would then have to surface, exhausted, only a hundred or so miles away from where the ordeal began--or at least put up a snorkel pipe--to recharge her batteries. At high speed, the much higher rate of discharge of the battery exhausted it much quicker (in the foregoing example, only 15 miles away).

By contrast, a submarine with a nuclear power plant would theoretically be capable of 30 or more knots, either surfaced or submerged, for several years. In the sense that a reactor is nearly as inexhaustible as the wind, in unsupported-cruising range Rickover brought the Navy back to the days of sail. More than this, he foresaw, for example, that the Arctic Ocean, heretofore inaccessible to men-of-war, would be a new operational arena for a submerged boat with an inexhaustible supply of fuel and able to make oxygen from electrolysis of the sea. Breaking through the ice from beneath in case of necessity, as for firing a weapon, was now the only problem--and he proposed innovative means to do this, too.

Today, the Navy powers two types of ship with nuclear reactors. First, the huge Nimitz-class aircraft carriers that, except for provisions (i.e., food), can stay at sea literally for years. At the height of the crisis with Iran during the Carter administration, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower remained under way for nine consecutive months save for a four-day port visit to Singapore. Today's carrier battle groups can be, and routinely are, replenished by air, and personnel changes are accomplished in the same way. Along with all its other functions, the aircraft carrier simultaneously serves its own antisubmarine, antiaircraft, and land-attack escorts as a massive supply ship for fuel and other categories of provisions.

Second, the submarines: no longer "boats" (although that term is still affectionately used), but full-fledged ships in the complete sense of the word. Of the two types of submarines in the Navy today, the "attack" class, which carries not only sophisticated guided-and-homing torpedoes--now thoroughly tested as a matter of routine--also is armed with highly accurate, 750-mile-range, subsonic Tomahawk cruise missiles that are fired from beneath the surface of the sea. An improved 1,500-mile-range tactical Tomahawk is in the works. Nowadays, neither torpedo nor missile misses its target, if properly prepared and launched.

The other type of submarine, the fleet ballistic-missile "boomer"-- officially the Ohio-class Trident missile submarine--is configured to carry 24 Trident II missiles that, like the Tomahawk, are launched submerged. During its ballistic trajectory, each of these 24 missiles can release as many as nine "MIRVs" (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles--the exact figure is classified and will be reduced if the START II treaty is finally ratified). Each vehicle is a guided missile of its own, possessing a nuclear explosive force more powerful than the bombs that laid Hiroshima and Nagasaki to waste. It may be asked if anyone can name any nation on this earth that could stand a single broadside from such a ship.

Today the submarine is, arguably, second only to the aircraft carrier in its importance to the Navy and the country, and the submarine force feels it may ultimately even transcend the carrier--for only the nuclear-powered submarine can hide effectively in the sea.

A Remarkable Transformation

These two dominantly destructive weapons systems, aircraft carriers and submarines, are however ameliorated by the inherent ability of the mother system of both: the ship. The ship--aircraft carrier or submarine, guided-missile cruiser or amphibious assault ship--brings flexibility with it wherever it goes, until the moment when it must go into action. Then it can be diplomatic or brazen, gentle or hard. Most likely, either the carrier air wing, surface combatant, amphibious ready group, or submarine would begin its function softly, barely making its presence felt: a nicety much easier for the surface ship to achieve than the submarine, but denied to all other arms. Any ship, her presence known or unknown, represents practical possibility for instant action under the control of the U.S. government. It can bring the ultimate weapon to the point of contact, ready in all respects to unleash its terrible power, and then hold its hand or let it all go, as the situation, and the nation's leaders, may require. "The lesson," Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery wrote in his History of Warfare, "is this: In all history the nation which has had control of the seas has, in the end, prevailed."

The remarkable transformation now underway in the modernization of today's Navy and in the design of tomorrow's will further increase its combat capabilities, operational concepts, and utility in profound and revolutionary ways. During the Cold War, the Navy-Marine Corps team responded to nearly 200 international crises--one almost every three months. During the past three years, the response rate increased to nearly one per month. Such high-tempo operations are likely to continue for the foreseeable future--but with fundamental changes. The lesson that Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig draws from recent operations is that, for the first time in history, naval forces are being called upon to influence events ashore in landlocked countries--with long-range missile attacks on terrorist camps in Afghanistan, for example, and sea- and air-launched strikes against Serbia and its forces in landlocked Kosovo.

The Navy now is developing even more accurate, long-range, all-weather weapons--missiles, aerial bombs, guided munitions, and naval guns--to take the fight far inland from the sea. By 2015, the Marine Corps also will execute its future warfighting concept--Operational Maneuver From the Sea--with faster, larger, and more efficient assault vehicles, aircraft, and air-cushion landing craft. Highly networked information systems will tightly link all Navy warfighting disciplines and forces--air, surface, subsurface, amphibious--in real time, across vast geographical areas. In the words of CNO Johnson, "They will use this coordination to bring combined, powerful forces to bear at the best place, at the right moment--creating rapid and overwhelming victory."

The surface of the sea, that tremendous membrane between air and water, can easily and cheaply carry huge cargoes of essentials. On it travels the world's commerce, the life-blood of nations. This is why it has always, since the beginning of time, been the object of competition or combat, and this will not change. In the modern context, the contest for domination of this all-important membrane has fallen to the U.S. Navy. Today, there is no other naval power--nor combination of powers--able to mount an effective opposition to the U.S. Navy's dominance as the preeminent global sea power.

But, just as the ocean's surface is continually transformed, so too can today's international circumstances change in unpredictable ways. Despite the continuing growth in the reach and power of its strike capabilities, the Navy is fast approaching its smallest size since the depths of the Great Depression. Unavoidably, the number of ships available for forward deployments plays an important role in the nation's ability to lower the risk to U.S. vital interests. To do this it must ensure a potent U.S. military response is available on instant notice anywhere in the world, and it must at the same time keep the burden of high-tempo operation at levels acceptable to Sailors, Marines, and their families.

It must do this. If it cannot, it will cease to be an effective force. Today's U.S. Navy owes much to the British Navy of the days of sail, but the many lessons must be understood. One is that forced servitude on board ship is a thing of the past (back then it included impressment, no liberty, and performance through fear of the lash). Today's Sailors and Marines will follow good leadership (the Marines do it best), but they will not accept unrequited burdens.

During the decade of the 1990s there has been a quantum leap in capabilities in all of the Navy's ships. To a nation exploding with new and undreamed-of computer and information technology, it is totally unacceptable for its warships to attempt to function with less than absolute state-of-the-art perfection when the fate of the nation, and of the young men and women making up each ship's crew, may hang in the balance. Anyone, even a computer neophyte, privileged to visit the combat-direction spaces of one of the Navy's first-line ships--destroyer, cruiser, aircraft carrier, amphibious assault ship, or submarine--comes away with an impression of extraordinary electronic capability, not only in the machines themselves, but also on the multiple large screens where the amazingly intricate information they use to manage and direct operations is displayed.

Equally impressive is the manner by which the commanding officer of such a ship controls her, usually from a combat-direction center--buried somewhere in her bowels--where there is the greatest access to information in real time. Control of all her weapons is at his or her fingertips and, if everything is as it should be, none of the ship's complicated weapons fails in its mission. This is reflected in the extremely high quality of the men and women operating both the ships and the weapons. Some of them are very young, but every one is a computer expert by any normal standard. All can (or could) command princely salaries "on the outside," and here indeed lies one of the major problems facing the Navy today.

Warfare at sea (all over the world, and in all the different venues) has changed more in recent years, because of the computer and information-technology revolution, than in the past thousand. It has not stopped changing, and weapon capabilities have been "improving" (becoming more accurate and more deadly--and at longer ranges) faster than the general public can appreciate. But at the same time, the spread of democracy and the very deadliness of warmaking capability means global wars are less and less likely.

Thanks to modern technology, today's ships can be built to last 50 years. If nuclear, they may never require refueling. Their weapons and computer technology, in major contrast, must be--and are--constantly updated. Such a ship, with her crew of irreplaceable people, will not be sent in harm's way unless fully computer-ready.

And that is where it stands today--unconsciously perhaps, because, unlike better guns or bigger armor, improvements in computer technology are invisible--but nonetheless powerful. All that is needed to harness that power are the qualified technicians--Sailors all--who, as always, will spell the difference between victory and defeat.

And so, as the U.S. Navy emerges into the new millennium, it mirrors the technological revolution of a century ago--facing new and as yet undefined challenges with the confidence of its proud tradition of sea-fighting excellence.